I have always been a firm supporter of generic marketing. I've chaired importer committees and worked on developing regional strategies. I know how difficult it is to secure an appropriate level of agreement, across the producer and distributor base, to plans with real cut through, and I know how powerful a well coordinated generic effort can be. I also appreciate that coming up with innovative plans is particularly difficult currently when budgets are severely constrained. Given all this and given that generic marketers have no direct control over the producers and wines they represent, I tend to believe that they have one of the most difficult roles in our industry. All this makes me loth to criticise any generic activity.

Does advertising really work? I decided to find out last week by re-enacting the Southern Comfort commercial. My audience was several hundred innocent Catalans on the Costa Dorada. Temperature: 32 degrees celsius.

News of wine crops across France being devastated by hail storms remind us all what a precarious life being a wine producer is. No matter how well your business might be doing, or how many trade listings you have, all that can stand for nothing if your vineyard happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when Mother Nature comes calling.

If you wanted to go somewhere to see the future of shopping in the UK then a trip to Watford would not be very high on your list. But ier this week a mini army of analysts, retail consultants and journalists all headed to see what Tesco's so called destination store of the future was all about.

Do you know how long it takes to drink an Olympic size swimming pool?* Me neither. Then I read the news from marketing wonks Nielsen that the UK consumed an additional seven Olympic swimming pools worth of bottled water in the first two weeks of July alone. That's not including at least 300 hundred packets of Elastoplast.

I've always found Lionel Ritchie hard to like. First he turned The Commodores from the hard funk of 'Brick House' to the ultimate soppiness of 'Three Times a Lady'. Then came 'Easy like Sunday Morning', a ballad so middle of the road, it was dead hedgehog.